From the perspective of an incoming graduate student, just how useful is the NSF fellowship? Before I offend anyone, or appear disrespectful, I understand that it does have a number of benefits:
1.) You can work with the professor you want more easily,
2.) you might not have to TA for as long a period,
3.) you might get paid somewhat more,
4.) and the fellowship is simply quite prestigious.
But I think it must be fair to say that the overriding concern of most prospective graduate students is list of schools they are accepted to.
This leads to my central question. Lets say you apply to school X, and are rejected. A month latter, you are awarded prestigious fellowship Y, that carries with it a nontrivial amount of funding. Is there any universe in which it would be appropriate to contact someone from school X, like professor Z, who you are interested in working with, inform them of your updated circumstances, and inquire if this could change anything about your acceptance/rejection status? Would this be seen as an egregious breach of etiquette? It is obviously easy to label this as trying to 'back-door' your way into a school, but I have no context for how severe an offense that might viewed as. It seems like the worst that could happen is professor Z simply says 'no,' in which case you will not be at school X to incur their wrath anyways. If this is not possible, then the pragmatic impact of winning the NSF fellowship (or any other late-spring award) seems somewhat marginal to me.
I might add that I harbor no real expectations of winning the NSF award. But you never know.
